The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

RIVER OF RICHES by Gerald Kersh

For some reason, s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here—or at least a good many more “literary” British authors have written it. {Kipling, Wells, Dunsany, Doyle, Chesterton, Priestley, Collier, Coppard, to name a few.)

In this country, fantasy, beginning with Hawthorne, has a long record of respectability; but even the best science fiction (with the notable exception of a few offbeat efforts by “major” writers, such as Stephen Vincent Benét’s “By the Waters of Babylon”) could be found ordinarily only in pulp magazines.

All this, of course, was B.B.—Before the Bomb. Then when s-f did achieve a measure of popular approval here, one of the first science-fiction stories printed in a top national magazine was by a British author. (Not the first. Heinlein beat Kersh to The Saturday Evening Post by about two months, early in 1947.)

Though Mr. Kersh lives in this country now, and is one of the more colorful lights in the New York literary firmament, much of his work retains the flavor of the traditionally English adventure story. This one is a tale told in a barroom, by that classic adventurer, the “younger son of a younger son.”

About the man called Pilgrim there was a certain air of something gone stale. “Seedy” is the word for it, as applied to a human being. It was difficult to regard him except as a careful housewife regards a pot of homemade jam upon the surface of which she observes a patch of mildew. Sweet but questionable, she says to herself, but it is a pity to waste it. Give it to the poor. So, as it seemed to me, it was with Pilgrim.

He was curiously appealing to me in what looked like a losing fight against Skid Row, and maintained a haughty reserve when the bartender, detaining him as he abstractedly started to stroll out of MacAroon’s Grill, said, “Dad-die be a dollar-ten, doc.”

Pilgrim slapped himself on the forehead, and beat himself about the pockets, and cried, “My wallet! I left it at home.”

“Oh-oh,” the bartender said, lifting the counter flap.

Then I said, “Here’s the dollar-ten, Mike. Let the man go.”

But Pilgrim would not go. He took me by the arm, and said in the old-fashioned drawling kind of Oxford accent, “No, but really, this is too kind! I’m afraid I can’t reciprocate. As a fellow limey you will understand. One’s position here becomes invidious. You see, I have only just now lost two fortunes, and am in the trough of the wave between the second and the third—which I assure you is not farther off than the middle of next month. I must get to Detroit. But allow me to introduce myself by the name by which I prefer to be known: John Pilgrim. Call me Jack. In honesty, I ought to tell you that this is not my real name. If some plague were to wipe out the male members of my family in a certain quarter of Middlesex, in England, I should be addressed very differently; and ride my horses, to boot. As matters stand, I am the younger son of a younger son, cast out with a few thousand pounds in my pocket, to make my fortune in Canada.”

I asked, “Was that your first fortune?”

“Heavens, no! Man on the boat had an infallible system shooting dice. I arrived in Canada, sir, with four dollars and eighteen cents—and my clothes. I roughed it, I assure you. Clerk in a hardware store, dismissed on unjust suspicion of peculation; errand boy at a consulate, kicked out for what they called ‘shaking down’ an applicant for a visa, which was a lie; representative of a wine merchant, wrongly accused of drinking the samples. I went through the mill, I do assure you. And now I am offered a lucrative post in Detroit.”

“Doing what?” I asked.

He said, “Checking things for a motor company.”

“What things?”

“A word to the wise is sufficient. This is strictly hush-hush. Less said the better, what? But I can put you in the way of a few million dollars if you have time and money to spare.”

“Pray do so,” I said.

“I will. But not being a complete fool I will not be exact in my geography. Do you know Brazil? I know where there is a massive fortune in virgin gold in one of the tributaries of the Amazon. . . . Oh, dear, it really is a bitter fact that men with money who want some more insist on having the more before they lay out the less! Yet I tell you without the least reserve that I got about ten thousand ounces of pure gold out of the people who live by that river”

“How did you manage that?” I asked.

Pilgrim smiled at me, and said, “I dare say you have heard of the tocte nut? No? . . . Well, the tocte nut comes from Ecuador. It is something like an English walnut, only perfectly oval, almost. As in the case of the walnut, the kernel of the tocte nut resembles in its lobes, twists and convolutions, the human brain. It is bitter to eat, and is used generally by children for playing with, as we used to play with marbles.

“Ah, but this is in Ecuador. Go into Brazil, into a certain tributary of the Amazon, and I can show you a place where these nuts—or close relations of theirs—are taken very seriously indeed. The tribesmen do not call them tocte, but tictoc, and only adults play with these nuts in Brazil—for extremely high stakes too. Fortunes—as they are counted in these wild parts—are won or lost on one game with the tictoc nuts. The savages have a saying there: ‘Tic-toe takes twenty years to learn.’ To proceed: ...”

From vicissitude to vicissitude is the destiny of the younger son (he said). I could, of course, have written to my elder brother for money. In fact I did. But he didn’t answer. In the end, I shipped as cook on a freighter bound for South America. I suspect it was running guns. The crew was composed of the offscourings of Lapland, Finland, Iceland and San Francisco.

I jumped ship first opportunity, with nothing in my pockets but the papers of an oiler named Martinsen which I must have picked up by accident, and looked, as one does, for a fellow countryman. Luckily—I have the most astonishing luck—I overheard a man in a bar ordering whisky and soda without ice. Blood calls to blood. I was at his elbow in a trice.

He was a huge fellow, and was about to go to the place —Which, if you’ll forgive me, I won’t mention—prospecting for rubies. Desirous of civilized company, he invited me to come along with him—said he would make it worth my while—offered me a share in the profits. He found the equipment, of course: quinine, rifles, trade goods, shotguns, soap and all that.

His idea was that, the market being good just then, if the worst came to the worst we might make our expenses out of snake skin and alligator hide. His name was Grimes, but he knew a gentleman when he saw one. But he was accident prone. Exploring mud for rubies, Grimes stood on a log to steady himself. The log came to life, opened a pair of jaws, and carried him off—an alligator, of course. They tell me that a mature alligator can, with his jaws, exert a pressure of nearly one thousand pounds’ weight. It upset me, I don’t mind telling you. Ever since then I have never been able to look at an alligator without disgust. They bring me bad luck.

The following morning I awoke to find my attendants all gone. They had paid themselves in trade goods, leaving me with only what I slept in—pajamas—plus a rifle, a bandoleer of .30-.30 cartridges, my papers and some dried beef.

Goodness only knows what might have happened to me if I had not been rescued by cannibals—and jolly fine fellows they were too. Sportsmen, I assure you. They only ate women past marriageable age. They took me to their chief. I thought I was in a pretty sticky spot, at first, but he gave me some stew to eat—it was monkey, I hope—and while I ate I looked about me. Anyone could see with half an eye that the old gentleman wanted my rifle.

Now I reasoned as follows: I am outnumbered about two hundred and fifty to one by savages armed with spears and poisoned arrows. In the circumstances my rifle must be worse than useless. Better make a virtue of the inevitable and give it to him before he takes it away. Be magnanimous, Jack!

So, expressing delight at the flavor of the stew, I gave him the rifle and the bandoleer. He was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude and wanted to know what he could do for me. He offered me girls, more stew, necklaces of human teeth. I conveyed to him that I might prefer a few rubies. Heartbroken, he said that he had none of the red stones, only the green ones, and handed me a fistful of emeralds to the value, conservatively, of a thousand rifles at a hundred and twenty dollars apiece.

I thanked him politely, controlling my emotions as our sort of people are brought up to do. But he mistook my impassive air for disappointment. He was downcast for a moment or two. Then he brightened and said to me, “Wait. I have something that will make you very rich. It has made me chief. But now I am too old to play. I will give it to you.”

Then he fumbled in what might laughingly be described as his clothes, and produced—guess what—a nut! Upon my word, a common nut, something like a walnut, but smooth and much larger in circumference at one end than at the other. Through years of handling, it had a wonderful patina, like very old bronze. “You know tictoc?” the old boy asked.

“I know tocte,” I said. “It is a game played by children in Ecuador.”

“You play?” he asked.

“Never. In Ecuador I have seen it played. In England we call it marbles.”

“Of these places,” said the chief, “I have never heard. Here, it is tictoc.”

Then he went on to explain—it took all night—that the tictoc nut was not like other nuts. Everything, said the chief, everything could think a little. Even a leaf had sense enough to turn itself to the light. Even a rat. Even a woman. Sometimes, even a hard-shelled nut. Now when the world was made, the deuce of a long time ago, man having been created, there was a little intelligence left over for distribution. Woman got some. Rats got some. Leaves got some. Insects got some. In short, at last there was very little left.

Then the tictoc bush spoke up and begged, “A little for us?”

The answer came, “There are so many of you, and so little left to go around. But justice must be done. One in every ten million of you shall think with a man, and do his bidding. We have spoken.”

So, the old geezer affirmed, the kernel of the tictoc nut came to resemble the human brain. Stroking his great knife, he assured me that he had many times seen one, and the resemblance was uncanny. Superficially, you understand.

To only one tictoc nut in ten million was vouchsafed the gift of thought. And the nuts, being very prolific, grew in the jungles in great profusion. Anyone who could find the ten-millionth nut, the thinking nut, was assured of good fortune, the old savage told me, because this nut would obey its master.

“Now play tictoc,” he said.

I said, “But I don’t know how.”

He did not answer, but led me to a strip of ground Stamped flat and level, and polished by innumerable feet. At one end someone had described a circle drawn with ocher. In this circle were arranged ten nuts in this pattern:

The object of the game was to knock the ten nuts out of the circle in the fewest possible shots. As a game, I should say that tictoc was much more difficult than pool, pyramids or snooker. You shot from a distance of about seven feet. It was a good player who could clear the circle in five shots; a remarkable one who could do it in four; a superlative one who could do it in three, flipping the oval tictoc nut with a peculiar twist of the thumb.

Several young fellows were playing, but more were betting their very loincloths on the champion, who had recently made a Three.

“Now,” the old codger whispered, “rub the tictoc between your hands, breathe on it and shout without sound —shout at the back of your mind—telling it what to do. Challenge the champion. Stake your shirt.”

The top of my pajamas could be no great loss. Furthermore, I had the emeralds, you know. So I took it off and offered my challenge. The young buck felt the cotton and put down against it a necklace of good nuggets, the largest of which was about as big as a grape.

He played first. On his first shot, out went five. Second, out went four. The last was easy. He had scored a Three.

And now it was my turn. Caressing my nut I said to it, without talking, “Now, old thing, show them what you can do. Try for a One, just to astonish the natives.”

Without much hope, and with no skill at all, I flipped my nut. It seemed to stop halfway, gyrating. Everybody laughed, and my opponent reached for my pajama top— when, suddenly, my nut kind of shouldered its way forward into the circle, and with something devilishly like careful aim, spun its way into the ten and pushed them, one by one, beyond the bounds of the ring.

You never heard such a shout! I had broken a record. Picking my nut up, I caressed it and warmed it in my hand.

The chief said, “This I have never seen. Two, yes. One, no. I know what it is—the markings inside that nut must exactly match the markings of your brain. You are a lucky man.”

Feeling the weight of the necklace I had won, I asked, “Is there any more stuff like this hereabout?”

He said no, they didn’t regard it especially. The ex-champion had won it downstream, where they picked it out of the river bed and gave it to their women for ornaments. A string of your enemy’s teeth meant something. But the yellow stuff was too soft and too heavy. “If you want it, take your tictoc nut and you can win as much of it as you can carry away—you and ten strong men.”

I promised him that when I came back I would bring more guns and bullets, hatchets, knives, and all his heart could desire, if he would lend me a good canoe and the services of half a dozen sturdy men to paddle it, together with food and water. He agreed, and we took off.

In fine, I cleaned out that village and went on downstream with two war canoes, all loaded with gold and other valuables, such as garnets, emeralds, et cetera. I should have left it at that. But success had gone to my head.

On the way I stayed the night in the shack of a petty trader, a Portuguese, from whom I bought a whole suit of white-duck clothes, a couple of shirts, and pants and some other stuff. “Your fame has gone before you,” he said, looking enviously at me and then at the gold nuggets I had paid him with. “They call you the Tictoc Man up and down the river. Now I happen to know that no white man can play tictoc—it takes twenty years to learn. How do you do it?”

I said, “A mere knack.”

“Well, give me another nugget and I’ll give you some good advice. . . . Thank you. My advice is, make straight for the big river, and so to the coast. Don’t stop to play at the next village—there is only one—or you may regret it. The Esporco are the most villainous Indians in these parts. Don’t push even your luck too far. Four ounces of gold, and I’ll let you have a fine weapon, a revolver, all the way from Belgium.”

The revolver I took, but not his advice, and we went on at dawn. In the late afternoon several canoes came out to meet us. My men spat and said, “Esporco, master—very bad.”

“What, will they attack us?” I asked. “No.” They indicated that the Esporco Indian was the worst trickster and cheat in the Mato Grosso. But I fondled the tictoc nut, while observing that in every canoe sat a girl wearing a necklace of raw rubies, and little else. The men—big fellows, as Indians go—had an easy, cozy way with them, all smiles, no weapons, full of good humor.

They hailed me as Senhor Tictoc, while the girls threw flowers.

My leading paddler, the stroke, as it were, growled, “When Esporco bring flowers, keep your hand on your knife”—a savage version of Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.

Still, I gave orders to land, and was received with wild delight. The chief ordered several young goats killed. I presented him with a sack of salt, which is highly prized thereabout. There was a banquet with a profusion of some slightly effervescent drink in the nature of the Mexican mescal, only lighter and breezier.

In a little while we started to talk business. I expressed interest in rubies. The chief said, “Those red things? But they are nothing.” And, taking a magnificent necklace from one of the girls, he tossed it into the river—I was to learn, later, that he had a net there to catch it. “I have heard that you are interested in stones,” said he, while I gaped like a fish. And he went away and came back with an uncut diamond of the Brazilian variety, as big as your two fists.

I displayed no emotion, but said, “Interesting. How much do you want for it?”

He said, “It has no price. I have been around, and know the value your people set on such stones. I also know—we ail know on this river—what would happen if the news got about that there was gold, rubies, emeralds and diamonds hereabout. Your people would come down on us like jaguars, and drive us off the face of the earth. As it is, we have enough, we are contented, we regard such stuff as this as pretty for unmarried girls. No, my friend, it is not for sale. But I tell you what. It being a plaything, let us play for it. You have a great reputation as a tictoc player. As it happens, so have I. Now what have you to stake against this stone?”

“Three canoeloads of treasure,” I said.

At this, one of his sons chimes in with, “Don’t do it, father! The man is a wizard. All the river knows it. He has a thinking nut!”

Apparently tipsy, the chief shouted, “Silence, brat! There is no such thing. It is a superstition. Tictoc is a game of skill, and I am the best man on this river.” He became angry. “Who questions my skill?”

Nobody did. The circle was made, the ten nuts arranged at their proper distances. I begged my host to shoot first. There was a breathless hush as he went down on his knees and shot a perfect Two—at which there was a murmur of applause.

Then I stroked my nut and asked it for a One. Out it went, spinning like a little whirlwind, and a One it was.

It is etiquette, in the tictoc game, for the winner to pick up the fighting nuts and bring them back to the base. Loser shoots first. This time the chief shot a Three. I was feeling warm-hearted. Who “wouldn’t, if he was certain to win a diamond that would make the Koh-i-noor and the Cullinan diamonds look like stones in a fifty-dollar engagement ring? So I said to my nut, “This time, for the sport of the thing, get me a Five. But last shot we’ll have another One and the best out of three games.”

It did as it was bid, and I lost with a Five. The Chief much elated, got our nuts and handed me mine with grave courtesy. I shot with perfect confidence. Imagine my horror when, instead of moving with grace and deliberation, it reeled drunkenly forward and barely reached the periphery of the circle! I wondered, could that mescal-like stuff I had drunk have gone to its head through mine? Thinking with all my might, I shot again—and knocked one nut out of the ring. A third time, and I finished with an Eight.

The chief went to pick up our nuts. I was numb with grief. He handed me the nut I had played that last game with. I looked at it—and it was not my own!

Then the truth dawned on me. The old rascal had swapped nuts after the second game! Simple as that. But I kept my temper, because in a split second everybody had stopped laughing, and every man had produced a machete, an ax, a bow or spear. I said, “There is some mistake here, sir. This is not my tictoc nut.”

“Then whose is it?”

“Yours. You are, no doubt inadvertently, holding mine in your hand. Give it back, if you please.”

And driven beyond prudence, I made a grab at it. I was fast, but he was faster, and surprisingly strong. I, too, am tolerably strong in the fingers. We stood locked, hand to hand, for about twenty seconds. Then I heard and felt a sharp little crack. So did he, for he stood back, waving away his tribesmen who were closing in. . He held out his hand with dignity; it held the common tictoc nut that he had palmed off on me. In my palm lay my own true nut, but split down the center, exposing the kernel.

I looked at it, fascinated. You know, I studied medicine once—might be in Harley Street by now, only there was a bureaucratic misunderstanding about four microscopes I borrowed. Silly old asses! I’d have got them out of pawn and put them back where I’d found them, as soon as my remittance came in. But no, they gave me the sack.

However, I have read some anatomy, and I solemnly swear that the kernel of my poor tictoc nut definitely and in detail resembled the human brain—convolutions, lobes, cerebrum, cerebellum, medulla—in every respect.

Most remarkable of all, when I touched it affectionately with my finger tip, it throbbed very faintly, and then lay still. Whereupon some of the virtue seemed to drain out of me, and I cried like a child.

But I pulled myself together and said, “Well, the bet is off. The game is null and void. Let me get my men together and push off.”

Then, in the light of torches, I saw bundles on the shore —very familiar bundles.

“To save your men unnecessary exertion,” the chief said, “I had them unload your canoes for you. I wish you no harm, but put it to you that you go quietly back where you belong. Come, you shall not go empty handed. Take as many small nuggets as your two hands can hold, and depart in peace. You overreached yourself. I would have given you the diamond for the thinking nut, and gladly, in fair exchange. But no, you had to cheat, to do bad trade, to bet on a sure thing. In this life, nothing is sure.”

I said, holding out the revolver, “And what will you give me for this?”

“Oh, two double handfuls of gold.”

“May I suggest three?”

“If you will allow me to test it first.”

I did. He fired one shot into the dark. I took the gun back and said, “First, the gold.”

Down by the river I took the liberty of scooping up a handful of heavy clay and filling up the barrel of that revolver. It would dry like brick. That old rogue would never play tictoc again.

But in burying the remains of my thinking nut, I had a weird feeling that I was leaving behind a certain essential portion of myself. Gold and jewels I can get again. But that, never.

“So I got to the coast and took ship, as a passenger this time, on a heavy freighter bound for Tampa, Florida. What with one thing and another, I arrived with only a few nuggets left, which I keep as ... I don’t know, call it keepsakes. You have been very kind to me. Let me give you one—a very little one—and then I must be on my way. Have this one.”

He dropped a heavy gold pellet on the wet table. It was not much larger than a pea, but shaped, or misshapen, beyond human conception. Fire and water had done that. “Have it made into a tie pin,” said Pilgrim. “But I couldn’t take a valuable thing like this,” I cried, “without doing something for you in return!”

“Not a bit of it. We limeys must stick together, and I’m on my way to Detroit. About seven days from now, John Pilgrim, at Detroit’s leading hotel, will find me. Help me on my way, if you like, but—” He shrugged.

“I have only ten dollars,” I said, deeply moved by a certain sadness in Pilgrim’s eyes. “You’re welcome to that.”

“You’re very obliging. It shall be returned with interest.”

“I must go now,” I said.

“So must I,” said he.

Marveling at the intricacies of the human mind, I walked until I found myself on Sixth Avenue, near West 46th Street, in which area congregate those who, with pitying smiles and a certain kind of shrug, can flaw a diamond carat by carat until you are ashamed to own it, and with a shake of the head depreciate a watch until it stops of its own accord. On impulse I went into a shop there and, putting down Pilgrim’s nugget, asked what such a bit of gold might be worth.

His reply was, “Ya kiddin’? Tickle me so I’ll laugh. What’s the current price of printer’s metal? . . . Worth? Kugel’s Kute Novelties sell those twelve for fifty cents, mail order. I can get ‘em for ya a dollar for two dozen. A teaspoonful lead, melt it and drop it in cold water. You can honestly advertise ‘no two alike.’ Gild ‘em, and there’s a nugget. A miniature gold brick. That manufacturer, so he puts out loaded dice ‘for amusement only’—he sells ‘em too. Seriously, did you buy this?”

I said, “Yes and no.” But as I dropped the nugget into my pocket and turned to go, the shopman said, “Wait a minute, mister—it’s a nice imitation and a good job of plating. Maybe I might give you a couple bucks for it!”

“Oh, no, you won’t,” I said, my suspicions aroused. I fondled the nugget in my pocket; it had the indescribable, authentic feel of real gold. As for that trick with melted lead and cold water, I suddenly remembered that I had played it myself about thirty years ago, with some broken toy soldiers, just for the sake of playing with fire. Recently-melted lead has a feel all its own, and is sharp at the edges. But my nugget felt old and worn.

“It could be, after forty years, for once I made a mistake,” the man said. “Let’s have another look.”

But I went out, and visited another shop a few doors away: one of those double-fronted establishments, in the right-hand window of which, under a sign which says OLD GOLD BOUGHT, there lies a mess of pinchback bracelets, ancient watch chains, old false teeth and tie pins. In the other window, diamonds carefully carded and priced at anything between two thousand and fifteen thousand dollars. The proprietor, here, looked as if he were next door but one to the breadline.

I put down my nugget and said boldly, “How much for this?”

He scrutinized the nugget, put it in a balance and weighed it; then tested it on a jeweler’s stone, with several kinds of acid. “Voigin gold,” he said. “Where’d you get it?”

“A friend gave it to me.”

“I wish I had such friends.” He called, “Giving, come here a minute,” and a younger man came to his side. “What d’you make of this?”

Irving said, “It ain’t African gold. It ain’t Indian gold. It ain’t a California nugget. I say South America.”

“Good boy. Correct.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You loin,” he said. “How d’you tell the difference between salt and sugar? You loin. . . . The market value of this little bit voigin gold is about forty dollars. I got to make a buck—I’ll give you thoity-five.”

“Eh?”

“Thoity-six, and not a penny more,” he said, counting out the money. “And if your friend gives you any more, come to me with ‘em.”

I took the money, caught a taxi, and hurried back to MacAroon’s place. The bartender was gazing into space.

“That man I was sitting with,” I said, “where is he?”

The bartender, with a sardonic smile, said, “He put the bite on you, huh? I can smell a phony a mile off. I didn’t like the looks of him as soon as he set foot in my bar. If I was you—”

“Which way did he go?”

“I didn’t notice. Soon after you left he ordered a double, no ice and put down a ten-dollar bill—left me fifty cents, and went out.”

“Here’s my telephone number,” I said. “If he turns up again, call me any hour of the day or night, and hold him till I get here. Here’s five dollars on account; another five when you call.”

But Pilgrim never came to MacAroon’s again.

I inquired high and low-—mostly low—but found no trace of him. A British-sounding man with an insinuating air, a malarial complexion and a misleading eccentric manner, who talks about the River Amazon and its tributaries —I will pay a substantial reward for information leading to his rediscovery.